Dam-building spree set to start on Mekong

By Johanna Son

MANILA (IPS): Plans for a string of hydropower projects along the Mekong River and its tributaries, packaged by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), are going full steam ahead despite fears about their long-term environmental and social impact.

The Manila-based ADB says the logic behind this trend is simple: countries in the region desire the dams, they are of interest to foreign funders and private capital and are thus financially viable.

These projects are to rise in the Greater Mekong Subregion, a grouping of six Indochinese countries that the Bank is selling as Asia's next boom area. ADB President Mitsuo Sato predicts that the region will be the site of the "expansion of the East Asian miracle" of which the Mekong is a vital artery.

Others are not so sure. Activists say the Bank, which turns 30 years old this year, is glossing over serious doubts about the sustainability of its dam projects.

Mihoko Uramoto of the Japan-based Mekong Watch Network says the ADB is so caught up with helping the private sector do business in Indochina's economies in transition that it has become "the dam broker for the private sector".

But ADB Vice President Lee Bong Suh told a press conference last Friday: "We make sure that all (environmental) concerns are fully addressed before financing a project".

At an ADB meeting last week ministers from the Mekong region reported "progress" in energy projects, most of them dam projects to be located in Laos.

Apart from the 210-megawatt Theun-Hinboun hydropower project which is to start commercial operation in 1998, Laotian officials spoke of four other schemes in various stages of study or planning.

A 85 million dollar loan for the 60 MW Nam Leuk hydropower project, co-financed by the ADB and Japan's Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund, was approved by the Bank in September 1996.

Studies of the Se Kong-Se San and Nam Theun river basins, a project being co-financed by the ADB and the French government, started in January this year. It is to be completed by August, and will affect Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.

Laotian minister for communications and transport Phao Bounnaphol said a study on the ADB-assisted the Sekong 5 hydropower project "will commence shortly".

He said Laos, which along with China, Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand and China's Yunnan province up the Greater Mekong Subregion, is keen to make use of its hydropower potential since it has a potential 18,000 megawatts to be harnessed.

Proposals to build up to 11 major dams on the Mekong have been criticized by environmental groups who say large-scale tampering with the river would wreck the environment and disrupt the livelihood of people who depend on it across Indochina.

The waters of the 4,500 km Mekong, which runs from the Tibetan plateau down to the South China Sea, support a rich ecosystem and provide food, water, transport and economic support for more than 50 million people.

Only 5 percent of the Mekong's annual flow is controlled by dams at present, says the U.S.-based International Rivers Network. But "the pace of hydro-development on the Mekong is accelerating along with the region's rapid industrialization," it said in a briefer on the ADB and the Mekong.

Activists say the implications of ADB-led dam development are even greater when seen together with individual hydropower projects eyed by different countries in a bid to tap the Mekong.

For instance, China plans to complete three large dams before the year 2000. The Mekong River commission also proposes nine dams, but activists say there is little attempt to study the cumulative impacts of different plans on the region as a whole as well as on downstream countries.

Lee says the Bank is well aware of "concern" by non- governmental groups over the environmental impact of dam-building in Indochina. He said: "We are increasingly paying more attention to environmental aspects". He added that most of the dams planned for Laos are run-of-river ones "where the environmental impact is least".

But Aviva Imhof, Mekong programs coordinator for IRN, said many projects would still have "disastrous" impacts on the Mekong watershed.

Often, she says, the environmental basis used by the Bank is flawed because it has in the past hired consultants that are also dam-builders.

For instance, the ADB in 1993 got a Norwegian consulting form, Norconsult International, to do an energy sector study for the Greater Mekong area. Norconsult is Norway's largest hydropower consulting firm, involved in several dam projects in Indochina, and believes that hydropower is the most environmentally benign solution to energy demand.

Activists also say the ADB does not give as much attention to developing renewable sources of energy and curtailing power demand, a claim Bank officials dispute.

Said Lee: "A project has to be financially viable. Unless it's proven viable, the Bank can't finance it. Alternative energy sources in many cases are simply not viable, so even if we wanted to do that, it's not viable."

But, he continued, the Bank is interested in it and will "encourage" its development by countries that wish to. For instance, Lee said, the ADB has financed a 150 million-dollar project for the Indian government to do more studies on solar energy.

Still, activists find excessive the Bank's focus on dam- building in a bid to open up Indochina to foreign investors, including hydropower firms in industrialized countries for whom the region is the 'last frontier'.

"In terms of hydropower it is really the dam building companies and the agencies that fund them that are pushing this approach," said Imhof. "Let's face it, hydropower is obsolete in most of the western world and is fast becoming that way for a lot of developing countries."